Natural choice

Friday

PORTSMOUTH — For the past seven years, the Green Grocer has specialized in natural and organic food in its store at 934 East Main Road.

Owner John H. Wood II said he has been careful to make sure the food he sells is healthy, and watches out for things like trans fats and additives.

“We’re very focused on the quality of the ingredients of what we sell,” Wood said Tuesday. “There shouldn’t be any high-fructose corn syrup, no growth hormones, no trans fats, no artificial coloring or artificial flavorings — all of those things that really seem to be made more in a chemist’s lab than on a farm.

“We really want to be what we call the gatekeeper to the food for the consumer.”

In view of that service, the Rhode Island Small Business Association will honor the Green Grocer as the state’s Veteran-owned Small Business of the Year. The local store will be honored along with five other small businesses around the state at an awards luncheon June 4 at the Alpine Country Club in Cranston.

“Again this year we are pleased to honor an outstanding class of small business owners and a financial champion,” Mark S. Hayward, director of the SBA Rhode Island District Office, said in a prepared statement announcing the awards. “These are truly the “best-of-the-best” and are deserving of this recognition for their hard work and demonstrated success.”

Wood’s emphasis on healthy food is a by-product of his service in the Army during the first Gulf War and the illness he developed while in Iraq, he said.

He served in the Army for three years, including about five months during Operation Desert Storm, when his artillery brigade was deployed from Germany to the Persian Gulf, he said. Although he did not see immediate action, he was close enough to hear explosions and gunfire.

When he returned from the Gulf War, he suffered from headaches, memory loss, aches and pains in his joints and dizzy spells. A Veterans Administration doctor told him they were factors involved in what became known as the Gulf War Syndrome, or environmental illness.

Wood was told to change his lifestyle, to watch his diet and to be careful of the chemicals in his everyday life, such as those found in detergents, soaps and shaving cream, which could contribute to the symptoms from the environmental illness.

He learned more about the illness and made the changes that needed to be made.

“Making that transition wasn’t easy, but it certainly improved my symptoms dramatically,” he said. “It was a lifestyle that I adopted and it made sense. It was something that I was becoming passionate about.”

He carried that passion into the effort to start the Green Grocer with his wife, Aly, in 2007.

The store is projected to do more than $1.5 million in business this year. That is almost twice as much as its first year, he said.

The choices the owners make in the products they sell is the difference between Green Grocer and other stores, Wood said.

“Primarily it’s about the ingredients for us,” he said. “We’re very vigilant about our product selection.”

That means checking the ingredients in each item, he said.

“We know that trans fats are now being targeted by the surgeon general,” Wood said. “For years, our industry has said that trans fats are bad.

“We’re looking at sugar as being as addictive as cocaine and the potential implications that has for causing diseases and disorders. Our industry has always shied away from sugar and tried to look for more natural alternatives.”

He checks the labels and tries to find products that taste as good, if not better, than their unhealthy alternatives while making people feel better in the long run.

That is one of the factors that keeps Havalah Schnurr of Middletown going to the Green Grocer almost every day.

“The products are great,” she said. “John and Aly have very good taste. They know what they are getting.”

Hap Morgan has worked at the store since it opened.

“It’s a great place to work,” he said. “The staff is like a family here. We’ve learned what the customers want, and we’re really happy to help them.”

Wood said he was flattered to be chosen for the SBA award out of all the business people who had been nominated.

“It’s nice to know that the hard work we do every day is worthwhile,” he said. “It feels good.”

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